A Berry Cool Solution

Merry Christmas from the House That Worked Out! And, as a special treat, here is both a blog entry AND a nifty video we put together ourselves. (Yes, someone has just discovered imovie). You can either read and watch or just scroll down for the story in our short (and super professional) video. I love it when a couple of problems can be solved with one solution. We managed this just recently.

PROBLEMS:

1. Irrigating our berry orchard involves filling buckets of water at a soakhole and walking 50metres with the slopping buckets through two gates to get to the orchard. Gates cannot be opened beforehand or dog will attack chickens in coop or chickens will get out of pen. Basically- watering the berries orchard has been a pain in the butt.
2. Duck pond filtering system currently not keeping up with revolting pooing ducks. Water is filthy, though ducks don’t seem hugely bothered.

The lack of rain this Spring has meant that I’ve needed to start watering the berry orchard early. After a few weeks of carrying buckets of water by hand from a waterhole to the orchard, I decided enough was enough. We don’t have a designated water tank for the garden yet, but I just couldn’t keep doing the hand watering with the buckets. They are awkward to carry, awkward to fill from the soakhole, and because it is such a painful exercise, the berries only get the bare minimum watering. Our duck pond is slightly uphill from the berry orchard. I started wondering how we could water from the pond. Obviously, a pond pump would allow us to water from the pond, but our life has always been about keeping things as basic (some would say as difficult) as possible, and I didn’t want to have to buy a fuel-powered pump- noisy, expensive, and cheating- if there was another possible solution.

SOLUTION:

Water the berry orchard with the filthy duckpond water, then top up the duckpond with clean water. To avoid any expensive pump, we incorporated the siphon method.

If a hose is filled with water, then one end placed into a container of water and the other end placed below the height of the container, the water will run out to the lowest point, creating a suction effect and pulling the water from the higher body of water. The video below says it all. Our new irrigating system is working, and it’s fabulous.